Saturday, August 28, 2010

The Future is here. I just forked a running website: Streamie.org

I recently started working on a Twitter client. This seems like a really stupid idea because there are so many already. My main motivation was the stale development of the Tweetie for Mac client and that I wanted something really, really hackable. Ideally with the ability to do JavaScript plugins.

A Twitter client with a node.js backend that talks to twitter's brand new user stream API

This means updates appear in true realtime in your timeline. No polling involved.

When you scroll down, streamie maintains your scroll state as new tweets appear. I can't use a Twitter client without this feature

It does some more stuff, but is far from finished.

Now be warned. Streamie is ultra alpha. It will probably crash the moment this blog post appears and it might just post goatse pictures to twitter on your behalf.

If you are not scared, read on:

Ultra Hackable

Now on to the title of this post:

Streamie is extremely hackable. You should never really need to do anything with the backend system (unless you want to fix bugs). The frontend has a access to the full Twitter REST API, so all regular features for a Twitter client should be implementable from the frontend.

Now if you want to build your own version of streamie, there are nine easy steps: